A freeway sign in Los Angeles advises motorists to save water because of the state's severe drought. / Richard Vogel AP

by William M. Welch, USA TODAY

by William M. Welch, USA TODAY

LOS ANGELES â?? Now that Southern California has dried out from recent rains, folks can get back to worrying about the epic drought that still grips the state and threatens its future.

But first, let's top off the swimming pool, water the lawn, wash those dusty cars and maybe get in a quick 18 on one of the hundreds of still-lush golf courses around the region.

For all the public worrying about drought, Southern California, where nearly two-thirds of the people in this giant state live, hardly looks on the verge of a new Dust Bowl.

Los Angeles does have some mild mandatory conservation steps in place: Restaurants are forbidden to serve a glass of water until a customer asks for it. Lawn sprinklers can run only on certain days of the week and never on Saturday. Digital signboards remind drivers stuck on the hated I-405 freeway to think about saving water.

But there still are a lot of intensely green yards, healthy palms and blooming Bougainvillea, suggesting life goes on for 20 million people of the region, even as Northern California's reservoirs are reduced to puddles and farmers in the Central Valley, fruit basket to the nation, worry how they will irrigate their next crop.

The effects of drought, like water rights, are distributed unevenly and are often unfair, says Bill Patzert, climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech.

Indeed, across semi-arid Southern California there are few signs that the water shortage has seeped very deeply into the public consciousness. Those periodic official snowpack measurements, revealing a paucity in the Sierra Nevada and thus less water runoff come spring, seem abstract and far away from the sunshine in L.A., where imported water has for decades fueled unprecedented development and growth.

Water experts here are accustomed to complacency.

University of California-Irvine earth sciences professor Jay Famiglietti sounds the alarm about vanishing natural groundwater. But he knows to bring along Leo, his handsome red Golden Retriever, when he wants to draw a crowd to a campus conservation event. Just talking drought won't do it.

"It's a bit of a challenge to engage people in Southern California in conservation because we look outside and we really don't sense it,'' he says. "That's the challenge of trying to raise awareness of statewide drought.''

The mandatory conservation orders for Los Angeles aren't a response to this drought: They were put in place during the last one, 2009, and have remained through wet and dry years, whether observed or not.

That 2009 drought prompted Los Angeles to unleash water police â?? city workers who issue citations when they find conservation violators. They mainly investigate water-use complaints from miffed neighbors, says Jane Galbraith, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Most violators face no more than a strongly worded letter.

Los Angeles' leaders once were so confident of abundant water that they poured concrete bed and banks under about 50 miles of the often-dry Los Angeles River â?? creating a highly efficient system for assuring storm runoff is lost into the Pacific Ocean.

Now, Los Angeles is trying to use reclaimed gray water on cemeteries and municipal golf courses where possible and paying homeowners to rip up grass lawn and replace with drought-appropriate landscaping or artificial turf. The "Cash In Your Lawn'' program pays $2 per square foot, up to $4,000.

Just to the south, the Irvine Ranch Water District pioneered recycled water for parks, neighborhood green spaces and other public areas, Famiglietti says. Orange County has built a system that purifies sewage water and injects it into groundwater aquifers, where it awaits reuse. "Toilet to tap,'' the conservation saying goes.

And there are experiments with converting seawater to fresh, with a plant under construction in Carlsbad that will be the largest reverse-osmosis ocean desalination facility in the Western Hemisphere, according to its builders.

But those aren't silver bullets. Famiglietti says desalination comes with a high energy cost and creates its own waste problems â?? the salty leftovers.

Southern California has to import most of its water, even in wet years, from Northern California, the Sierras and the Colorado River.

Motivated by past droughts, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which controls much of the water used by Los Angeles and the region, has been stockpiling. Its above-ground reservoirs are generally more full than those in Northern California, and it has hundreds of thousands of acre feet in underground storage.

"That's allowed us to really get through this very difficult situation,'' Famiglietti says.

The paradox is that in Southern California, where the song says it never rains, the short-term water outlook is better than in Northern California, a region accustomed to more rain.

"In the short term, the next year or two, things are fine because we have a lot of storage,'' Famiglietti says. "It's after that that we have to be concerned... If this drought continues, even these great water managers will simply not be able to squeeze water from a stone.''